Facebook Allowed Netflix to View User’s Private DMs, Lawsuit Reveals
By Movieguide® Contributor
An antitrust court filing unsealed last weekend revealed that Netflix and Facebook had close ties throughout the 2010s. This led to the shuttering of Facebook’s streaming service and allowing Netflix access to private DMs on the social media platform.
“For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship,” the court filing said. “It is no great mystery how this close partnership developed, and who was its steward: from 2011- 2019, Netflix’s then-CEO Hastings sat on Facebook’s board and personally directed the companies’ relationship, from advertiser spending, to data-sharing agreements, to communications about and negotiations to end competition in streaming video.”
In stewarding this relationship, Hastings communicated directly with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and the then-COO, Sheryl Sandberg. The relationship began in June 2011, when Hastings joined Facebook’s board. He immediately began pushing for Facebook to share user data with Netflix, and by 2013, Netflix had access to users’ private direct messages.
In return, Netflix was tasked with indexing the data, “provid[ing] Facebook a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendations sends and recipient clicks by interface.”
This data, among other things, helped Facebook refine its targeted advertising, something Netflix was spending $40 million a year on in 2015. After five years of an intimate relationship, Facebook and Netflix would begin to butt heads as the social media platform announced its desire to enter into the streaming space.
In 2017, Facebook launched Facebook Watch, which featured, among other content, a talk show starring Jada Pinkett Smith, a talk show starring Steve Harvey and a scripted series starring Elizabeth Olsen. The company planned on rolling out original content of standard 30-minute shows alongside shorter series running 5-to-10-minute episodes. From 2016 to 2017, the company spent $1 billion on the streaming service.
The next year, the service was gutted, as the budget was slashed to $250 million a year, and many shows failed to be renewed. At the same time, Netflix’s ad spending rose, reaching $200 million a year by 2019.
The lawsuit claims that the relationship between the two companies violated antitrust laws. Hastings’s participation on Facebook’s board while heading Netflix was particularly troubling as it allowed him to steward a monopolistic relationship.
Movieguide® previously reported:
A new report finds that thousands of companies monitor each Facebook user’s data.
“The average participant in our study was identified in the data by 2,230 different companies,” Consumer Reports stated. “Some were identified by more than 7,000 companies.”
The report found that 186,000 companies were tied to the data of 709 participants and that each of those companies, on average, shared the data of eight study participants.
Those companies include familiar names like Home Depot, Walmart, Macy’s, Amazon, Etsy and PayPal.
Since the group of study participants was self-selected, Consumer Report made it clear that the study does not “make any claims about how representative this sample is of the U.S. population as a whole” but did point out that their report is a rare look at how Facebook collects data.
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